Information printed about a topic is often printed on multiple pages because the information does not fit on a single page and/or is more effectively presented using multiple pages. The multiple pages may be in the same source or in multiple sources. For example, technical drawings of an aircraft may be printed such that different portions of the same diagram may be printed on different pages. Drawings of one assembly on the aircraft may be contained in one library or source, while drawings of another assembly may be contained in a second library or source.
Printed information may also be printed such that one document contains one level of detail about an object, while a second document contains a second level of detail about the same object. For example, a diagram of an aircraft may be printed such that the exterior of the aircraft is visible in the diagram. Another diagram of the same aircraft may be printed such that the exterior of the aircraft is obscured, but the interior of the aircraft is presented. Thus, a reader may use different diagrams to learn different information about the same object.
As another example, wiring diagrams of wiring systems are often printed across multiple pages because the graphical and textual information presented in the wiring diagram is too great to fit on a single page. Thus, a reader may change documents multiple times to learn information about an entire wiring system.
Documents such as engineering diagrams, technical drawings, wiring diagrams, and other suitable document types may be used in the maintenance of an aircraft. The documents are created to be viewed in printed form. However, such documents are commonly stored in electronic form and viewed on a display device of a data processing system. As a result, the reader looks through different documents that may be on different types of media. This type of review may be more time-consuming than desired to find information about an aircraft.
Documents regarding a complex system of systems such as an aircraft may therefore contain large amounts of information regarding the complex system and its components, subsystems and parts, and the connections and relationships among the respective elements of the complex system. The complexity of the system and the large amount of information often required to describe the system may increase not only the time required to study the documents, but the difficulty in comprehending the complex system and its elements. A user may not only require the time to review documents containing large amounts of information, but may also require the time and endure the difficulty of studying the information to understand the ways in which the complex system and its elements relate to each other.
In today's printing systems, a printer controller manages complex data and presentation objects prior to printing a document. Similarly, there exist situations where complex data and presentation objects require spending valuable computational cycles to search, reference, find generate and/or cache/save resources. What is desired is a printer controller that performs communications with other components, such as a document parser and tiler to conduct any number of functions in preparation for printing.
There also exists the need for the selected print layout style to preserve the relationship between the complex data. This would include a display or printout of the one or more selected document components separately or together, and in their respective entireties or in a portion in which they are viewable in a viewable portion of the layout that maintains the relationships between the components.
There also exist situations utilizing document complex systems that base resource information may be lost, or the relationship with the base information is lost. Relocating missing resource or regenerating missing resources is computationally expensive and potentially occurs in the printer controller during page processing when runtime is most critical. Therefore what is desired is a means to generate instructions for storing and referencing complex resource information and relationships in preparation for printing.
Therefore, it may be desirable to have a method and apparatus that takes into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as possibly other issues.